The Western Hemisphere or western hemisphere is mainly used as a geographical term for the half of the Earth that lies west of the IERS Reference Meridian (which crosses Greenwich, London, United Kingdom) and east of the Antimeridian, the other half being called the Eastern Hemisphere.
In this sense, the Western Hemisphere consists of the Americas, the western portions of Africa and Europe, the extreme eastern tip of Russia, numerous territories in Oceania, and a portion of Antarctica, while excluding some of the Aleutian Islands to the southwest of the Alaskan mainland.
The term is often used in political rhetoric to refer to only North America and South America (or the New World) and adjacent islands; however, the Western Hemisphere technically includes all of the aforementioned territories.
In an effort to define the Western Hemisphere as the parts of the world which are not part of the Old World, there also exist projections which use the 20th meridian west and the diametrically opposed 160th meridian east to define the hemisphere. This projection excludes the European and African mainlands and a small portion of northeast Greenland, but includes more of eastern Russia and Oceania (e.g., New Zealand).
The population of the geographical Western Hemisphere exceeds 1 billion.
Read more about Western Hemisphere: Countries in Both Hemispheres, Nations in The Western Hemisphere But Not in The Americas
Famous quotes containing the words western and/or hemisphere:
“It is fatally easy for Western folk, who have discarded chastity as a value for themselves, to suppose that it can have no value for anyone else. At the same time as Californians try to re-invent “celibacy,” by which they seem to mean perverse restraint, the rest of us call societies which place a high value on chastity “backward.””
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)